The Story Behind the Presets

It started on an evening at the end of 2016. My girlfriend and I had been watching old Magnum P.I. reruns — Tom Selleck, moustache and all — and she'd fallen asleep during the credits. I hadn't. Somewhere in that end-of-episode text was a Technicolor credit, and since I couldn't sleep either, I went down a research hole on how Technicolor actually worked.

That led to Kodachrome, and its own strange, fascinating development process — something I'd been curious about on and off before, but never properly dug into. That one sleepless evening turned into weeks, then months, then years. By the time I stopped for the night, I'd already built the first rough version of what would soon become the Classic K14 Kodachrome presets.

I never planned to turn it into a product. Almost nothing here started that way. I build things because I want the tool myself, and because I want to find out whether it's even possible to build. The products came after, almost as an afterthought. What follows are the stories behind the ones that did.

Current collections

Archive

Earlier versions of some collections have been retired in favor of newer editions, but their stories are kept here for reference.

• About the Classic K14 (original, discontinued)
• About the Classic ECN-2 Lightroom Preset (original, discontinued)
• About the Classic Film Presets for Lightroom (original, discontinued)